What’s behind the slaughter of the Rohingya

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What’s behind the slaughter of the Rohingya

17 September 2017. A World to Win News Service. Hundreds of thousands of Rohingya people – in numbers approaching half of the estimated million of this ethnic group living in Myanmar – have been driven from their homes and country by armed Buddhist militias and the army and police. These murderers have descended upon hundreds of villages, shooting into homes and burning whole villages. The army has laid anti-personnel land mines at crossing points on the border between Myanmar and Bangladesh to kill or maim those fleeing and prevent anyone from coming back.

This attempt to eliminate an entire people is made possible by the brutal convergence of a number of different forces in Burma and the interests of Western imperialism, each with its own specific, competing interests but coinciding in a rejection of the Rohingya people’s right to live in Myanmar.

The army, which in one way or another, directly or indirectly, has dominated the state since what was once called Burma became independent from Britain in 1948, has waged war against various minority ethnicities on and off for seven decades. During this time, just like under the monarchy before the British conquest, the Buddhist clergy have not been just a religious institution but a pillar of the state.

In recent years, a major part of the clergy, along with Buddhist nuns and lay people, have mounted a movement called the Association for the Protection of Race and Religion (known as MaBaTha) that preaches that the Rohingya people must be eliminated because they are allegedly the spearhead of a global drive against Buddhism by the whole world’s Muslims, citing not only the Taliban (who dynamited Buddhist shrines in Afghanistan) and Daesh (Islamic State), but all “followers of Allah”. MaBaTha has criticized the army and the state for not doing more to eliminate the Rohingya “Islamic threat”, and have now been fully unleashed by the army in a planned and coordinated campaign against the Rohingya, under the pretext of what was said to be an attack on a Myanmar border police outpost in August.

The third component of this genocidal alliance is Aung San Suu Kyi, head of the National League for Democracy and symbol of opposition to the military junta that took power in a 1962 coup. Long the darling of Western governments and their witting and unwitting accomplices, she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991, a distinction shared with war criminals in the US and Israel, among others. The daughter of the founder of the country’s army and long the leader of its independence movement, Aung San Suu Kyi rose to political prominence in the 1980s student movement against the military junta which at that time combined a proclaimed belief in “the Burmese Way of Socialism” with Buddhist tradition and support from among the traditional exploiting classes. The UK and US began to support her against the junta as a way to reassert Western control and oppose Soviet and later strong Chinese influence. Since her election as de facto head of state in 2015, whatever she may have done to restore some rights, she has objectively been part of the stabilization of an indisputably murderous state, including the army, as Myanmar moves deeper into the hands of its former colonial rulers and other imperialists whose economic and political supremacy blocks any real way forward for the country’s people.

The sudden reaction against Aung San Suu Kyi among Western establishment commentators and her fellow Nobel Peace Prize winners is an exercise in hypocrisy. Even the accusation that she has “remained silent” on the slaughter of the Rohingya is actually a cover-up. In fact, she publicly justified it by referring to them as “Bengalis” (that is, not ethnic Burmese) and “terrorists”. Echoing the Trump regime’s attacks on the media in the name of “fake news”, she even called media footage of burning villages and fleeing refugees “a huge iceberg of misinformation”.

Although the Buddhist fundamentalists have sometimes looked at Aung San Suu Kyi with suspicion because of her Western ties, this stand is not new on her part. She has never opposed the laws denying citizenship for the Rohingya, restricting marriage between Buddhists and non-Buddhists, refusing the right of Muslims to vote or run for office, not allowing them access to education and medical care and other tenets of what can only be called Buddhist fascism. (Anyone who feels that this term is an exaggeration should watch this interview with a prominent Myanmar Buddhist monk: www.theguardian.com/world/video/2017/sep/08/the-battle-for-myanmar-buddhist-spirit-video.) She at the very least went along with the “Protection of Race and Religion Laws” adopted as part of the legislation that enabled her transformation from a political prisoner to the head of the country in 2015. And she continues to enjoy the support of the UK and US governments, which can only mean that she is seen as serving their interests in this situation.

Trump, who so freely menaces regimes his government targets, even threatening “a military option” against Venezuela because “people are suffering and they are dying,” at this point has no problem with the slaughter of the Rohingya. Just as he declared that there were “fine people” among the Nazis and Ku Klux Klan members who paraded in Charlottesville, Virginia, the White House called on “Burmese security authorities to respect the rule of law, stop the violence, and end the displacement of civilians of all communities”, as if this were a clash between “communities” and not basically a war of the state and state-supported lynch mobs against an oppressed community. In an implicit “dog whistle” (coded support) for the Myanmar government, the US refused to call the Rohingya by their name.

The term “Royhingya” is anathema to Myanmar’s rulers because it means people from the Myanmar state of Rakhine, one of the poorest in the country, where some Rohingya families have lived for many centuries and most for many generations. While the British colonialists reduced the power of the Buddhist clergy and displayed deliberate disrespect for any religion not their own, it is also true that they employed the same “divide and conquer” strategy in Burma as in India, Africa and elsewhere, often favouring one particular minority against other ethnic groups. This fed reactionary and in the long term sometimes genocidal rivalries between ethnicities. In Burma the British excluded the local elite and exploiters from the colonial administration, filling even menial positions such as policemen and labourers as well as top administrative jobs with Britons or others brought from neighbouring Bengal (then India, now divided between India and Bangladesh). It is not surprising that the country’s independence movement became largely intertwined with Buddhism.

But the rise of Buddhist fundamentalism today represents more than just the continuation of this history. What’s happening in Myanmar parallels developments in nearby Thailand and Sri Lanka, also majority Buddhist countries where economic and social transformations produced by a globalized imperialist economy are roiling the traditional order with its social relations, ideology and values. The rulers of these countries, like religious fundamentalists everywhere, although in varying circumstances, are seeking to protect and/or advance their reactionary interests in the context of the same global system that is at the same time undermining the conditions of their rule. Despite their mutual hatred, there are striking parallels between this trend in Buddhism and its Islamic, Christian and Jewish fundamentalist counterparts. (More generally, see the chapter “Why is religious fundamentalism growing in today’s world?” in Away With All Gods: Unchaining the Mind and Radically Changing the World by Bob Avakian. This is also discussed in his just issued The Problem, The Solution and the Challenges Before Us (http://revcom.us/avakian/bob_avakian-the-problem-the-solution-and-the-challenges-before-us-en.html).

The global media has provided horrifying pictures of burning villages, endless lines of people threading their way across muddy rice paddy dikes to reach the river dividing Myanmar from Bangladesh, and then crossing in fishing boats to the other side where they will try to survive in huts made of canvas and sticks. The majority are women and children. Many of the women have not only witnessed their homes burned, but have been subjected to rape, and aid agencies are reporting 1300 Rohingya children in Bangladesh’s refugee camps are without any parents. Yet even as all this happens in the world’s plain sight, not one of the world’s great powers has taken a real stand against it. What remains hidden to most people is the way this sickening crime is linked to the heritage of colonialism and to the continuing global domination by imperialism.

Editorial:

Introducing a transformed AWTWNS

14 March 2017. A World to Win News Service. With great joy, the editors of A World To Win News Service announce its transformation into a more thorough-going tool for revolution based on Bob Avakian's new synthesis of communism.

AWTW News Service first saw life in January 2003, at a critical juncture when under the banner of their global "war on terror" the US-led imperialists had launched and were expanding what was in fact a war for empire. After invading Afghanistan, they were preparing to invade Iraq. It was a time when a powerful people's war was surging forward in Nepal, led by revolutionaries who were participants in the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement. RIM gathered communists from around the world who, in the wake of the defeat of the revolution in China following the death of Mao Tsetung, banded together from the five continents to strengthen the struggle to do away with the capitalist system through revolution.

AWTW News Service was inspired by RIM, which based itself on Marxism-Leninism-Maoism (MLM). During the years since then, the news service untiringly exposed the crimes of the imperialists in many corners of the globe, bringing to light stories of popular resistance against oppression, analysing how all oppression was ultimately rooted in the system of capitalism-imperialism, and pointing to the need for the solution, revolution.

These past fourteen years have seen major developments, including the collapse of RIM itself. Not only are some of the forces previously united in RIM now sharply opposed to each other, the previous understanding of revolutionary communism itself has, to borrow Mao Zedong’s term, "divided into two". One strand of the old Maoism has wound up in a social-democratic liquidation of the core revolutionary principles of Marxism, exemplified tragically in the capitulation of the Maoist leadership in Nepal and the termination of the revolutionary war there. Others from the previous MLM movement are stuck in a dogmatist, religious-like upholding of sterile "Maoist" formulas that are equally devoid of revolutionary content. In opposition to this, Bob Avakian's new synthesis of communism has fully emerged, rescuing the scientific kernel of communism while criticizing and repudiating those secondary aspects in the past understanding and actions of communists that have actually gone against communism's liberatory nature. The result is that we now have a qualitatively more scientific framework for understanding the world and changing it through revolution, which is gaining adherents from among forces previously part of RIM as well as others more recently attracted to communism. (For more on RIM, its history, its collapse and the division of Maoism into two, see Communism: The Beginning of a New Stage – A Manifesto from the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA and Letter to Participating Parties and Organizations of the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement by the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA.)

And how the world cries out for revolution! Everywhere inequality has intensified, women face the violent intensification of patriarchy and degradation, and whole states in parts of the Third World are written off as "failed" and left to rot. The hopes of millions worldwide that soared as US-backed dictators were toppled by mass uprisings in the “Arab Spring” were dashed with the re-consolidation of reactionary rule. War has ripped gaping wounds in the Middle East as the Western imperialists and their local allies contend with reactionary Islamic jihadists, trapping the masses in a vortex of terror and despair. Millions have been driven from their homes, and thousands drown in desperate attempts to cross the Mediterranean to safety – while those few who make it face ever higher walls erected by these same imperialists to keep them out, physical walls as well as the walls of hatred being whipped up against them. Now, after years of normalizing mounting levels of nationalist jingoism, racism and misogyny, the dynamics of this system have propelled the fascist Donald Trump into the post of commander-in-chief of US imperialism. This in turn is giving major impetus to fascist movements that have been steadily gnawing their way into the political mainstream of Europe – in Austria, Hungary and Poland, and now the Netherlands, France, Germany and elsewhere. Throughout the oppressed nations too, the rise of “strong men” like India's Modi, Turkey's Erdogan, Duterte in the Philippines and others, tells the same story: the post-World War 2 order is rapidly coming apart at the seams.

The most fundamental question facing humanity today is whether this great turmoil will give rise to the establishment of regimes that are far more repressive and reactionary than even those today, with an unprecedented intensification of oppression and inequality, the unleashing of war and famine, environmental catastrophe and potentially far worse, or whether the oppressed can be enabled to rise, led by a core of conscious revolutionaries, and dismantle the existing state apparatuses in key parts of the world and establish radically new state powers that begin to do away with all oppression and exploitation. This has everything to do with how well hundreds and thousands today can be armed with a scientific approach to reality and act on that basis. Today this means transforming AWTW News Service into one firmly based on Avakian's new communism, a task that is proudly being assumed by the communists who have been the driving force in it over these years – a task that you are being asked to join in, in countless ways: reposting, distributing, writing, reporting, debating and corresponding with it, to name but a few.

Articles are needed that lay bare how the source of every kind of oppression in every country is ultimately rooted in the capitalist-imperialist system, whether it be through analysing the coup d'etat in Turkey, the failure of the Syriza experiment in Greece, the rise of fascism in the US and Europe, etc.

The news service needs analysis that lays bare the major faultlines ripping through every class-divided society and propelling millions into questioning and resistance, to help increasing numbers make the leap from being fighters on one front against capitalist oppression to fighters on every front. To take just one example, it needs to highlight the many different ways that brave forces are stepping outside normal channels to resist the draconian measures being enacted against migrants, exposing how it is the capitalist-imperialist system that is driving immigration and clamping down on migrants. It has to help establish a powerful internationalist current around this burning issue – showing why and how it is essential that the "whole world comes first", rather than "what does this mean for me and my country" – so as to bridge borders between peoples, to change not only what people think but how they think, to train them in the communist line and outlook. Or, in relation to patriarchy, to bring out why you cannot break all the links in the chain of capitalist oppression except one, why leaving male supremacy unchallenged quickly opens the door to the strengthening of every form of division and inequality. All this is part of the process of "fighting the power and transforming the people, for revolution" – and not least of all, bringing forth a new generation of revolutionary leaders in this process, who can use this news service to help identify and bring together more revolutionary forces wherever they may be.

It is critical to expose the system and its institutions and structures, but it is also vital to put forward the solution, a new kind of state power and a new way of organising the society and economy to meet people's needs in the broadest, most liberating sense, and step-by-step enable people to make the transition, through revolution, to a whole new world of flourishing humanity, armed with critical thinking and free of the shackles of class, patriarchy and all social divisions and inequalities. To do this we need to take on and tear apart the reactionary verdict on revolution and socialism. Otherwise, our criticism of the existing system loses force and purpose. Furthermore, based on the new synthesis summation of the socialist experiences of the 20th century, we need to show the necessity, possibility and desirability of Avakian's re-envisaged socialist society – how it not only meets the basic needs of the people, but will be a vibrant society marked by an unprecedented flourishing of intellectual and cultural life.

Without BA's new communism and the understanding that has developed on the basis of his approach and method, even for those who have vital elements of understanding about how thoroughly rotten all that exists really is, it is difficult to understand that the world doesn't have to be the way it is, that the potential for a radically different way of living for all humanity lies entangled in today's web of contradictions that are driving society, trapping oppressed humanity in dog-eat-dog relations, and threatening unprecedented disasters. Avakian's visionary understanding of the goal of communism shows how that is not only possible, but an urgent necessity, crying out for action right now.

With this understanding as the solid foundation of the news service, its pages will be open to others who, from different perspectives and approaches, bring to the light of day otherwise hidden stories of resistance and opposition to the prevailing order, shed light on the crimes of the system and how it works, reveal the complexity of the forces at work, and do all this in a way that compels others to turn to this site as a vibrant hub of critical analysis and debate. To truly become a weapon for revolution in growing parts of the world, articles need to be shared, correspondence is needed, key articles translated into different languages, and more. To further this, the news service will rupture from its weekly edition format that has been more oriented to the print media epoch, and instead focus on releasing articles on the Web hot on the heels of major events in the world. We need contributions from all those able to help so that the now far too narrow scope of our articles, limited by our current abilities, can begin to better match the needs of what must necessarily be a global revolutionary process.

Hard truths need to be stated clearly from the outset: the strength of the forces worldwide fighting for communist revolution pales in comparison to the immense challenges before us. But it is an even more important truth that never before in history has there existed a clearer and more scientific understanding of the source of oppression and what is needed to do away with it. On this foundation, A World To Win News Service can and must become a powerful tool serving all those who long for an end to oppression and exploitation, drawing forward and training thousands and influencing millions in many countries around the world, hastening the day when humanity can break free of the shackles that have enchained it for all too long.